


I Remember Melodies

by acaelousqueadcentrum



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-03-07
Updated: 2016-03-08
Packaged: 2018-05-25 05:04:11
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 3,221
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6181360
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/acaelousqueadcentrum/pseuds/acaelousqueadcentrum
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Small stories of Lexa and Clarke in the aftermath of 3x07. </p><p>OR</p><p>How I struggle to cope.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. How Do You Ruin Me?

She returns, silent, to Arkadia. 

Murphy pulls her along through the forest, drags her over the fallen trees, the rivers that do nothing for the blood on her hands. She doesn’t fight him, she doesn’t put up any resistance to his insistence that they return. 

He doesn’t say home. 

Someday there will be a part of her that is grateful for that.

~ * ~ 

Arkadia is a minefield and she walks through it blindly. 

Pike demands her head, but Bellamy manages to quell his lust for the time being. She doesn’t know how.

She doesn’t care. 

Her mother looks at her with eyes that know–this is not the kind of broken that she can fix. There is no tonic, no knife that can cut out the darkness from her heart, set it back to it’s old rhythm. 

Instead, Abby draws her into arms more motherly than Clarke’s felt in years. She fills up a basin full of hot, hot water, overflowing with soap, and coaxes Clarke into it, washing away the dirt and the grime, the sweat and the oil that’s caked into her skin. 

Clarke lets her, lets her mother move about her limbs as though she were a child again, but there is no youthful innocence within her. Not anymore. Her eyes stare ahead, focusing on nothing, seeing no one. 

She’s wrapped in a blanket and there are voices around her–Abby, Raven, Kane, even, at one point–but she hears no one. 

She hears the voices of the dead instead. 

They could wash her a hundred times more.

She’ll never be clean. 

~ * ~ 

There comes a moment when she considers it. 

Considers the object Jaha holds out to her like a prayer. 

“You won’t hurt anymore, Clarke,” he tells her in the same voice he used to caution them–her and Wells, children then, and true–not to stay up too late. 

She worries the disc between her fingers. 

She places it under her tongue. 

She doesn’t swallow. 

This pain, this ache, this memory of something beautiful … 

… it’s all she has left. 


	2. Heal for the Honey

She dreams.

Everything is possible in her dreams.

~ * ~ 

The light, it’s golden. It’s liquid gold the way it falls upon Lexa’s skin. 

And her hair, spun copper. Warm as it coils around her fingers. 

But neither has anything on Lexa’s lips. 

Soft. 

A softness Clarke could never have imagined up in the hard, cold world of the sky.  And she wonders, why falling has always been a thing hung out like a threat, why the ground has always been a symbol of the end. 

Clarke fell to the ground like she falls in love with this girl before her. 

Hurtling and inevitable.

And the landing, there have been bumps. But there’s also been this, delicate and pure and so, so tender. 

Soft.

Yielding. 

Beautiful.

~ * ~ 

They make love like there’s no war at the door. 

They make love like they have all the time in the world. 

Clarke kisses her way down the dark lines that mark Lexa’s back, a story in pictures, a myth writ on the very skin of its goddess. 

She wonders what her part of the story will look like, if someone will ink it in bold, black lines upon Lexa’s strong back. Or if it will be more delicate, hidden, perhaps. Etched under a perfect breast, over a rounded hip, onto the soft, secret skin of an inner thigh. 

Clarke wonders if Lexa will let her design it herself, their tale. Earth goddess and sky angel, elements colliding and the whole new world that will rise from the ashes. 

But then Lexa turns, and pulls her down until skin meets skin.

And Clarke forgets about stories and myths. 

Clarke forgets about everything but this. But now. 

But Lexa and this bed and the play of strong fingers at her entrance.

This is a moment she could live in forever.

~ * ~ 

“Such sweet sorrow,” she whispers into Lexa’s ear as they slowly part, their little moment come to an end. 

And Lexa blinks, smiles, and kisses her again. 

“Parting always is,” she says, and steals a final kiss. 

Clarke can’t bring herself to say goodbye, to say the words. 

 _We will meet again_ , she promises herself. 

~ * ~ 

Sleep brings her peace. 

Sleep brings her dreams. 

Sleep brings her Lexa, a moment preserved in time.

And love. 

Always love.


	3. Fixin' to Die

They’re alike.

It’s the first thing Clarke realizes about this woman, the Commander. 

Heda.

Lexa.

They’re far more alike than they are different. 

It’s funny, fate. 

A hundred years and a couple of hundred miles into the atmosphere, and still, here she lands. In the path of someone she recognizes, a heart and soul she understands, she knows like she knows her own. 

~ * ~ 

“For my people” becomes their touchstone. Their reminder of what stands between them. A catalog of everything they’d die for. 

It’s funny, because Clarke understands better than anyone else, because she would do the same, offer herself up on behalf of the men and women she leads. But still, the casual way Lexa puts herself in front of every pauna, real and figurative, leaves an ache in her chest that she doesn’t quite know what to do with.

She can give herself up for her people, Clarke knows, can sacrifice herself for the promise of the Sky people’s survival. But the idea of Lexa doing the same, of Lexa throwing herself on the altar to protect her own, that, Clarke decides, is untenable. 

That, Clarke decides, is unacceptable. 

Her reasons why don’t matter. 

It just is.

~ * ~ 

“If it’s my time,” Lexa tells her, “then my spirit must move on.” 

But Clarke shakes her head. 

“No,” she answers, refusing to accept the possibility, refusing to let Lexa go without a fight. “No. You fight, Lexa. You fight him and you win. You survive. You hear me?”

Her voice is nearly desperate, but Clarke doesn’t care. It doesn’t matter. Not with so much at stake. Not with Lexa’s life at stake.

“Clarke–” Lexa starts, but the blonde cuts her off. 

“No, Lexa,” she says again, firmly. “I need you alive–for my people.” 

There’s a moment of silence, the words hanging in the air between them. But then Lexa nods. 

She understands.

“For your people,” she says, and there’s something not quite a smile curling around the line of her mouth. 


	4. The Best Today

In another time, in another world, they pass each other a thousand times on the street before life intervenes. 

It’s a rainstorm and a broken umbrella, a pretty girl soaked and hurrying past the shops along the avenue before ducking into a coffee shop to escape the miserable torrents.  It’s a spilled coffee and a laughing apology, a number slipped into a stranger’s hand. 

_Call me sometime. C._

It’s a first date and a second and a third. It’s a walk in the park and a bicycle trip along the lake and a kiss so delicate Clarke feels like spun glass. 

No one’s ever been careful with her before. 

No one’s ever been soft. 

Not until now, until Lexa with the moss green eyes and the gentle, gentle lips. 

Not until the girl who falls into her life like spring rain and stays like the summer heat. 

~ * ~ 

Clarke falls in love sometime between the coffee and the number, though it takes her head longer than her heart to figure it all out. 

But Lexa, Lexa falls in love to Clarke’s warm, sleepy embrace, the soft cotton of the blonde’s too-big pajama shirt enveloping them both. Lexa falls in love with Clarke in the quiet morning silence, the little sniffle of allergies that stops just short of a snore. She falls for the dry smack of Clarke’s lips as she licks at them, the little line of drool drying in the corner of her mouth. 

Clarke at rest, Clarke without walls, Clarke at her most vulnerable. 

Lexa falls in love with the way Clarke loves her completely. The way she trusts her, in a way that the brunette knows Clarke has never trusted before. 

Clarke falls in love all at once, entirely, and Lexa, Lexa falls in love in pieces. Breath by breath and beat by beat. 

~ * ~ 

It’s a love story. 

The kind no one ever writes about. 

It’s not simple, but it’s not hard. 

And maybe it’s the only version of the world where they end up together. Maybe in an infinite number of universes they are broken. Maybe there is an infinite number of them, each aching for something they’ll never have, each looking for someone they’ll never find. Or maybe some of them, in their other lives, stumble over each other but can’t reach, can’t hold on, can’t see. Ships passing in the infinite night. 

But it doesn’t matter. 

Because in this life, they are together. 

In this life, they are happy and in love. 

~ * ~ 

Some day, in the not quite so distant future, Lexa will roll over into the warmth of a familiar softness, blinking against the bright morning sun that cuts through the dim light of their bedroom. 

And for a moment, she’ll think about all the things that could have been, the paths she could have taken. 

If not for the rain. 

If not for the wind and the umbrella, the wet floor, the coffee. 

All the moments that led to this one, here, curled up in bed next to the woman she loves. 

And she’d think of the person she might have been if not for the if nots, but a deep, throaty cry will echo down the hallway and pull her from her thoughts. 

“Stay,” she’ll whisper to the blonde who stretches and groans and whimpers at her side. “I’ll bring her to you.” 

And she’ll forget, on the short walk to the little room at the end of the hall, all the infinite possibilities, the ripples in the pond. Because in this world, in this life, in this moment, they’re together. Happy and in love.

And what matters beyond that anyway?


	5. Bloodshot

There are debts to be paid.

Clarke takes her currency in blood.

It seems fitting. 

It’s the only thing that means anything on the ground, anyway.

~ * ~ 

Pike is first. 

She takes his head. 

Walks right up to the Grounders at the edge of the kill-zone, and throws it down before them. 

It’s symbolic–she has no need of such savagery, but the Grounders will appreciate the drama. And she knows Titus will get the message writ in Pike’s open-mouthed horror, his cloudy eyes.

They will meet again. 

~ * ~ 

War is hell. 

Clarke doesn’t notice. 

She has wars and hells all her own.

 _Bellamy was right_ , the voice in her head whispers, _you are great winged death. Come down from the heavens to mete not justice, but revenge._

The voice drowns out all the others. The concern of her mother, the hand pressed into her fevered brow as she shakes and shudders in the silent hours of the night. The sad memory of her father, the goodness she can no longer find within herself. 

Lexa, resolute and hopeful. Lexa, who waged war in the name of peace. 

Lexa, who believed in something better. 

Who believed in her.

~ * ~ 

She’s lost count. 

Of the names become her burden. Of the number who simply knelt with bowed head before her, who met their fate with honor, and those who ran and weaseled and tried to deal. 

Of the people she’s lost. 

Of the ghosts that haunt her. 

There’s Kane gone, and Monty–she could not cry for them. 

There’s Jaha and Murphy and Bellamy–she would not cry for them. 

Lincoln and Raven and her mother–these, she weeps for, and it gives her hope, that still she can feel. That still there is some blood she cannot bear. 

The voice that is Lexa is a little stronger that day.

~ * ~

Titus is last. 

The empire is stable. Lexa’s empire is whole. 

She’s brought the thirteen clans to heel. 

Death, it seems, is as powerful as ever. 

Titus, she lets live until the end. Her modern Moses, never reaching the promised land. 

She carves a kingdom out of the ground–Lexa’s dream of peace–but Titus will never see its first sunrise. 

“Wanheda,” he greets her, waiting for her. 

He’s been waiting for a long time.

And when she slips the knife into his throat, when she feels the warm gush of blood over her hands, she’s not surprised to see its hue–black as night. 

~ * ~ 

In the morning, she stands before Aden, a boy no longer. 

In mercy, he adjudges her banished, and though she would have preferred the alternative, she understands. 

He will honor Lexa’s memory well. 

If there were any part left of the girl who’d loved–who’d been loved–she would have been proud.

But she’d eaten her own heart long before. Chased it down with what remained of her soul. 

Death has no need of such burdens. 

~ * ~

She leaves.

She doesn’t look back.  

Now is her time of waiting.

But who comes for Death? 


	6. Confusing Happiness

_Turn back the clock._

_Turn back the clock, move the hands yourself, if you must._

_Set your watch and count in reverse._

_There’s always time for a second chance._

_There’s always time._

~ * ~ 

Lexa doesn’t die.

The bullet never leaves the barrel of gun. 

Clarke never rockets down to the ground. 

The cool steel never brushed against Costia’s dark, delicate skin. 

There is no Ark and no Ground. 

There is no AI, no mushroom clouds, no destruction of the world as it once was. 

~ * ~ 

_Start over._

_Start there._

~ * ~

Lexa grows up in the old neighborhoods of New England, surrounded by history and tradition. She haunts landmarks, makes friends with ghosts. She reads thick biographies of founding fathers and mothers, of battlefields and the band of men and women who dreamed of a nation and then built it.

“Can you imagine,” she’s quoted in a local newspaper after winning an essay contest for the Fourth of July, “they imagined a world that could be better and they brought it to life. They started a revolution because they believed in the right to be free. And maybe our nation isn’t perfect, it has problems, but maybe that’s the best part about it. Trying to be better, fighting for more, it’s been a part of us from the start.”

No one is surprised when she declares her major one semester into her college experience. Or when she continues on for a Master’s, a PhD. No one is surprised when they hear she’s writing a dissertation on the Revolutionary War.

Lexa’s first love has always been a past that hopes for a better future.

~ * ~ 

_Take it slow._

_Take it slow._

~ * ~ 

Clarke is born into the bright beaches of the West Coast, the clear blue skies and the warm air. Her skin is golden and her hair streaked with the sun and her laugh rolls over the people in her life like the early morning waves breaking over the shore. Wild and somehow steady all at once. Safe, because even though they recede, you know they’ll always return. 

She grows up swimming in the ocean and sleeping under the stars, chasing boys and girls in equal measure and learning how to talk herself into and out of love.  Her father calls her _princess_  and her mother calls her _Clarkeplease_ , and she knows that she is loved just as much as she knows she is not understood.

It’s no surprise that her decision confounds everyone–to leave after college graduation and drive across the country to New York. To follow a dream she’s never admitted aloud to having. Time, she’s learned, is too uncertain to waste on maybes and somedays.

“What about being a doctor, med school?” her mother asks, folding t-shirts and fitting them into the duffle. “What about helping people, saving lives?” 

But her father doesn’t ask why, doesn’t try to understand. Still the giant of her childhood memories, still the measure by which she marks the good in herself, in the world, he holds her tight in his strong arms and whispers his love against her hair.

“Make waves, Clarke,” he tells her from the other side of the open window as he gently closes the door of her car. 

~ * ~ 

 _And … go_.

~ * ~ 

It’s a red-eye flight from New York to LA. 

A conference, a job interview, her one good suit packed carefully in a garment bag somewhere in the baggage compartment. 

It’s a girl with sun-kissed hair and red, swollen eyes, sniffling into the sleeves of a worn, tattered hoodie, two sizes too large at least. 

It’s the shudder of the plane and the sharp intake of breath, the fingers clenched and white on the armrest between them. 

“Here,” Lexa says, and slips her hand underneath the girl’s, swallowing down a gasp at the spark that ignites along her arm at the first touch of skin to skin, “just hold on. I’ve got you.” 

Clarke doesn’t let her go.

~ * ~ 

And it’s an end and a funeral for a man she’s never met. 

And it’s a beginning and a promise of something wonderful to come.

And she doesn’t get the job but she gets the girl and she knows she’s the luckier for it.


	7. Goodnight, Travel Well

Clarke gives in.

She takes the chip, swallows it down. 

She’s tired, she’s tired, she’s so goddamned tired. 

The fight never ends. And nothing ever changes.

Nothing ever changes.

Nothing will ever change.

People keep dying and everything tastes of blood and when Jaha holds out the little piece of metal like a sacrament and promises her that her pain will end, she takes it.

She takes it.

She’s not quite sure she believes him. Her pain isn’t physical, isn’t a bone that can knit or cut that can heal. 

It’s a part of her, it’s in every bone and blood cell. 

It’s a part of her biology, sunk into the swirls and whorls of her DNA. 

She doesn’t believe him and she doesn’t trust his word but she takes it anyway. 

Because what more could she possibly lose?

~ * ~ 

Raven takes it and swears her pain is gone. 

She talks to ghosts that no one else can see now.

Jasper takes it and swears his heart has never felt more whole.

He can’t remember the name of the girl he found and lost within the Mountain.

Clarke takes it … 

                              … and nothing happens.

And then she realizes, there’d always been one more thing to offer up in sacrifice. 

Clarke takes it and nothing happens.

She has nothing left to hope for anymore.

~ * ~ 

ALIE finds what she was looking for. 

Not a trinket, but a program. 

Not a spirit, but a storage device.

A flip switches, and a utopia beckons. 

Clarke welcomes it with open arms. 

~ * ~ 

“Clarke,” the wraith whispers, and extends a hand. 

It feels real. 

It feels real. 

It feels real and Clarke recoils. 

Not a heaven, but a hell. 

~ * ~ 

In the distance, she hears her mother calling to her. But the fog is thick and the words slip past her before she can catch them.

~ * ~ 

The thing that isn’t Lexa speaks to her with Lexa’s voice. Touches her with Lexa’s gentle hands. Loves her with Lexa’s warm heart. 

And Clarke lets herself believe. 

It’s easier. 

It’s easier. 

It hurts and it tears her apart but it’s easier.

She can survive with this.

She can survive.


End file.
